Property developer Crucible Alba Group is Scotland’s fastest growing small company after seeing its turnover soar by 430.9 per cent to £7.8m over the last three years.

The company, which was formed by former Ashleigh Construction chairman Alex Steel and former Business Homes development director Brian Robinson in 2011, was number two in last year’s Sprint 100 listing.

It is one of 30 companies which were in last year’s listing and 19 of them, including Crucible Alba, have risen up the rankings.

Some 10 have slipped down the listing and one was unchanged.

The Sprint100 companies have between £250,000 and £8m turnover in their current year. We rank them by total percentage turnover growth over three years and they cannot be loss-making in their latest year.

The day-to-day focus of the business is commercial development projects throughout Scotland and the north of England.

Last year they were joined by chartered surveyor Michael Smart, who was previously development director for BAM Properties in Scotland and North of England.

Its developments have included a new Premier Inn and Marks & Spencer’s Simply Food on the site of a former abattoir in St Andrews.

Robinson says the company has been working hard to deliver further development projects in what has been a very difficult time for the property industry in Scotland as a whole.

Smart says: “It has obviously been a difficult year with all the uncertainties. For lots of reasons people are delaying making decisions. The message across the board at the moment from anyone you speak to is that everything is just taking a ridiculous amount of time.”

Nevertheless work on its latest project, a 4,600 sq ft store for the Co-op in Gretna, is due to start in December.

“We are working on a number of projects at the moment ranging from small convenience retail and drive-through coffee developments up to large mixed use development sites which will include buildings in the leisure, office, hotel, care home and retail sectors, “ says Robinson.

“We can’t be specific on the coffee drive-through locations at the moment as we are just about to complete on the legals. We are working with both Costa and Starbucks on different opportunities across the country.”

“The way we operate is we find a site that we think will work and we try and find the occupier that we think will fit that site.

“In terms of our plans for the future, the development pipeline we have at present will keep us busy however our aim is to continue to steadily grow the business and to become a successful developer across the property sectors.

“We are currently working on a couple of urban regeneration projects where we have been approached to become involved which are very exciting. They involve some very big projects two of which are hopefully about to go to the next stage.

“Our aim is to grow the business. We have got a really good team of consultants around us as well. There are about 10 to 12 consultants we work very closely with on each development.

Number two in the listing is sustainability software and data firm Ecometrica, which has seen turnover growth of 179 per cent in the last three years to £2.25m. It is one of 70 new companies in the listing.

Ecometrica’s software supports all aspects of sustainability planning, operations and reporting and its clients include many large listed companies.

The three of them previously worked together at Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management (ECCM).

“I went to work for Richard in 2003 as a greenhouse gas analyst,” says Davis, who

has advised multi-national companies across many industry sectors, including oil and gas, petrochemicals, aviation, public transport, finance, and professional services.

He has also been involved in the design of industry standards having advised on the development of the PAS2050 product standard, the Carbon Trust Standard and has been on UK Government working groups for biofuel greenhouse gas accounting.

“Those were in the days when nobody knew what a carbon footprint was.

I rang up businesses and said would you like to know what your carbon footprint is and they would say to me oh we haven’t got a carbon footprint.

“It was really in the days of people not understanding. But that changed quite considerably over the next five years or so.”

Davis says that Tipper has been a leader and innovator in his field for two or three decades.

Tipper has worked as an adviser on climate change issues for many government, business and international organisations.

He founded the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management (ECCM), and was appointed to the UK Roster of Experts on Climate Change.

He also advised on numerous standards and methodologies for accounting for greenhouse gas emissions and did the first carbon footprint assessment for Ford Europe in 1996.

Davis said that in essence what they were doing was accounting.

“It wasn’t financial accounting but the discipline was almost exactly the same,” he says.

“We thought why isn’t there a package out there that can do this? We should be the first to build that.

“Richard was thinking even bigger thoughts about not just getting numerical information into a system but also using observation data from satellites because we did a lot of land use and forestry work on a consulting basis.

“His vision was to have a platform that brought all of that together. It was bold and well ahead of its time as Richard’s visions tend to be.

“So we wanted to go and do that but we couldn’t really get the attention of the parent company at the time to come and let us do that with the investment needed to build a platform.

“In 2008 we began planning to go our separate ways. Richard managed to raise a substantial amount of money for the business.

“I found a place on the Edinburgh Pre-incubator Scheme at the University of Edinburgh, run by Adrian Smith, who is now our CFO.

“That was the kind of impetus we needed to get going. So we got our money and had some clients as well and got off to a decent flying start but then of course – I think it was almost the next month – the crash happened and we could have done without that.

“We were doing consulting but the mission was always to build the leading environmental and sustainability accounting platform with this space mapping angle to it.”

He admits it was a fairly slow and painful process developing the software but it was finally ready around 2011.

The majority of its customers are large corporates based in the UK including Aggreko and Aberdeen Asset Management in Scotland as well as major companies like ARM, Compass Group and National Express.

The company is also expanding into North America with offices in Montreal and Boston.

“We are headquartered in Edinburgh and we have a commercial operation in London because a lot of our clients are based there or have operations there,” he says.

The company also helps businesses and governments identify risks and opportunities by combining satellite earth observation data with local information and business intelligence.

Last year it landed one of its most significant contracts with a role where it co-ordinated a major new international project on behalf of the UK Space Agency.

The firm took the role of main contractor in one of the first projects of the agency’s International Partnership Space Programme (IPSP), setting up a network of virtual regional Earth Observation (EO) Labs to develop suitable products for the forest sector.

The project was aimed at addressing a lack of usable data from the unparalleled numbers of images being sent to Earth from satellites.

It used advanced cloud computing systems and Ecometrica’s software platform to allow data to be managed, made relevant and shared.

Last month it teamed up with The University of Edinburgh to establish a new Earth Observation Lab aimed at deriving maximum benefit from the vast amounts of spatial data produced by satellites.

It will allow researchers around the world to share data and create customised applications to monitor environmental changes in forests, agriculture and coastal ecosystems.

Dropping down from first to third position is Edinburgh-based Kennox Asset Management, which achieved a still remarkable 173 per cent increase in turnover to £2.6m.

Kennox which was launched in 2009 by its current management team Peter Boyle, Charles Heenan and Geoff Legg has just one product, a global equities fund called The Kennox Strategic Value Fund.

The £210m fund is managed by Heenan, a former First State and Stewart Ivory equities manager and Legg, previously with Towers Perrin.

Boyle says: “The Kennox Fund has performed well through the uncertainties seen this year, up 35 per cent year to date.

”We run just the one fund, which we’ve been looking after for almost 10 years now, and have no intention of adding to this. You can only have 100 per cent commitment to one thing.”

Number four is Ayrshire-based landscape company Glen Services (WK), whose sales have risen by 103 per cent to £582,000.

Boutique investment manager Dundas Partners is number five with a 95 per cent rise in turnover to £1.67m.

The firm, which manages global equity portfolios for long-term, sustainable capital and dividend growth was founded in 2010 by Alan McFarlane.

His investment career began in 1980 in private equity at what is now 3i Group. He joined Ivory & Sime plc in 1983 to manage global equity portfolios.

Before starting Dundas in 2010 he was CEO of Walter Scott & Partners Ltd, an Edinburgh-based global equity manager acquired by BNY Mellon in 2006.

The firm is headed by Russell Hogan who has been managing partner since April 2012.

He spent 17 years at Aegon Asset Management, now Kames Capital, starting as a trainee and rising to become CIO in 1995 and thereafter CEO with responsibility for £33 billion of clients’ funds.

Ace Builders Ltd is sixth in the listing with turnover up by just over 90 per cent to £846,000.

The company was founded in February 2010 by David Bowes and business partner Barry Cousins.

Initially the firm was primarily a brickwork contractor however now it undertakes all construction and civil engineering work.

It has worked in the housing, public, rail, and private sectors and its projects have included upgrades to Motherwell, Bowling, Maybole and Cambuslang rail platforms for Balfour Beatty.

Edinburgh-based property investment, development and asset management company Ediston International Holdings, whose turnover had leapt by 89 per cent to £2.6m is in seventh position.

Founded in 2004 by Danny O’Neill the company works with clients throughout the UK and globally.

In eighth position is Revera Asset Management, which was in sixth position last year.

Revera’s turnover rose by 57.7 per cent to £774,000.

The company, which was founded in 2003, is headed by Glen Nimmo and Stephen Grant – who are the two fund managers in the business.

The firm runs two regulated investment funds, which focus on identifying and investing in established, profitable and cash generative UK businesses, which have the potential to deliver medium and long-term growth.

Number nine is egg producer Gosford Organics whose sales have risen by 48.8 per cent to £807,000.